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Nasir’s use of color and a technique called "Page Flipping" made the current crop of games look sick. Page Flipping used a duplicate screen (“page”) for everything that was displayed on the Apple; using machine-language instructions, you were flipping between the two pages thousands of times each second, in order to eliminate the flickering that made microcomputer graphics look so unappealing.

But by 1925, when Ford and Firestone were thinking of getting into the rubber business, this boom had long turned to bust, largely because of the actions of another Henry, who arrived in the Amazon over half a century earlier to commit what observers today call “bio-piracy,” which would eventually unravel Brazil’s latex monopoly. Henry Wickham was a prime example of the kind of imperial rogue chronicled by Rudyard Kipling. Only Wickham didn’t travel east to make a name for himself in Britain’s formal colonies; instead he went west to Latin America, where London in the late nineteenth...